YMMV / Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

• Award Snub: At the 2009 SAGY awards hosted by ScrewAttack, it was nominated for "Worst Game of the Decade", but lost to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).
• Awesome Music: The game contains some fairly catchy tunes^note though sadly, they rarely actually play in-game due to a programming error, such as this relaxing trance piece that serves as the menu theme.
• Best Level Ever: While this game's infamously incomplete state makes it hard for most players to call any levels good by overall standards, if you can get the fifth course, Small Town Road, to load up (it crashes most of the time), it's a snazzy nighttime course set in what appears to be a rural town's main street, as opposed to the other three courses that are set in open wilderness. Since the CPU opponent is impossible to lose to, you can just take your time cruising down the course and enjoy the scenery.
• Bile Fascination: Pretty much everyone who bought it — at least, after the initial wave of customers who thought it was going to be a bog-standard truck racing game — did so because of its reputation as "the worst game ever made".
• Critic-Proof: The aforementioned Bile Fascination caused the game to sell 20,000 copies, not much for any other game, but enough for a title this low-budget.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The rigs have no maximum speed when driving in reverse, which can result in some very entertaining gameplay. More amusingly, if you drive forward and then release the gas, your truck decelerates naturally, but if you drive backward and then release the reverse-drive key, you immediately go back to zero speed, even if you were traveling beyond the speed of light!
  • Playing a new race after having already completed one can cause the game to declare you as the winner as soon as you cross the starting line, negating the effort needed to complete the course again.
  • The lack of slope physics means your truck can go up even the steepest of inclines without losing any speed. In fact, it even maintains the same horizontal velocity, so it's actually going faster when traveling up slopes.
• Memetic Badass: The trucks themselves. As this Reddit thread put it:
  "At this truck's speed, it could move 18.3 trillion kilometers in 1/10th of an attosecond. 18.3 trillion kilometers before the flash could even register that it moved. Imagine if I could move so fast that I could walk to Pluto and back 1,000 times before you even registered that I had moved. That's what this truck can do to the Flash. All this is to say that the truck would generate enough force to obliterate the universe, and probably the multiverse."
• Memetic Mutation: "YOU'RE WINNER !" ^Explanation The victory screen of the games shows this text under an image of a trophy. The phrase has since seen widespread use across the internet, usually to mock a perceived failure (in a similar vein to any number of "you tried" memes).
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Has the lowest ranking ever on both Metacritic and Game Rankings, yet it still sold at least 20,000 copies. Undoubtedly, many of these sales were precisely because of the game's notoriety.
• Obvious Beta:
  • The game is completely devoid of collision detection, and aside from the ground itself, you can drive through anything you encounter. This includes even bridges, which should allow you to drive on them, but instead, you just sink through them and drive on the bottom of the dry lake.
  • The game is an utter memory vampire - if you pull up Task Manager, you'll see that the program uses 50% of available memory, way more than it should.
  • In an attempt to improve the game, Stellar Stone released a patch that corrected certain complaints. However, the patch fell short of implementing full functionality, as the animation of the opponent's truck stops short of the finish line, and the broken map was replaced with an identical copy of an existing map.
• Once Original, Now Common: The infamously incomplete state in which the game was released shot it into internet stardom back in the 2000s, but in an era where online distributors have opened the floodgates for games that are just as unfinished as this one, if not more so, it's easy for younger players to question what made this game so unique in the first place.
• Signature Scene: The infamous "YOU'RE WINNER !" screen and its accompanying three-handled trophy.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's hard not to get at least some level of enjoyment out of the game's numerous flaws and bugs. Opponents never win, you can drive through solid objects, one track crashes the game when selected, and you can accelerate backward infinitely, climb the steepest mountains with almost no loss of speed, or go outside the level's boundary. Even The Angry Video Game Nerd himself can't help but have fun playing a game with as few rules or limitations as Big Rigs.
• So Bad, It Was Better: The patches take away some of the most iconic aspects of the game while doing nothing to meaningfully improve it. The AI cars now move, but don't cross the finish line, and "YOU'RE WINNER !" is replaced with "YOU WIN!". It's safe to say that the earlier, less finished version of the game will always be the one that people remember the most.
  • Big Rigs also has a sister game, Midnight Race Club: Supercharged!, with the two originally being the same game but getting split into two mid-development. It runs on the same engine, but features a larger selection of vehicles and adds collision detection and a degree of AI functionality. Naturally, the only time anyone talks about it nowadays is when discussing its relationship with its less-functional sibling.
  • Honestly, the same goes for all of Stellar Stone's other work. While the rest of their games are all generally considered to be better than this one from a purely technical standpoint, the studio will forever be known across the internet as "the developers of Big Rigs".

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